D&D General Why are we fighting?

[Orius]

While I was the first person to bring up morale in this thread, I know it's not a perfect solution.

First, I think players need to be aware that gaining experience from encounter comes from defeating or overcoming the encounter. This doesn't require killing everything off, if the party achieves a victory. This has been the case since at least 2e.

Some players might feel paranoid about leaving enemies alive, and will seek to kill everything. Here it's on the DM not to go overboard with the "gotcha" situations.

And there are players who are just bloodthirsty and will murderhobo everything in sight. That's not necessary the fault of the DM or rules. For example, in my Night Below game I was running, there was a scripted encounter with hostile NPCs that stated they'd flee if things went bad. Well things did go bad, and the two survivors attempted to run, but the party wizard locked them down with web and the party ruthlessly finished them off.

Don't forget the shopping scene slogs, too. I wish there was a subsystem to run away from those!

Oh yes. One of the first games I played in had a player fart around for a good twenty minutes real time trying to buy a magic battleaxe, and the rest of us were not impressed or entertained.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

I agree with your assessment here. I suspect Matt is the one who is finding combat in 5th ed. is boring and assuming, or projecting, that sentiment to the majority of the D&D community.

I watched this video last night and I was a little surprised it came from Matt Colville - the guy who has repeatedly stated in other videos the reason we play D&D is (paraphrasing) "to kill monsters and take their s***, which is what makes it fun."

He does bring up some good points in terms of how to address this issue if you are finding a problem with your players leaning towards combat being boring - tie something more to the combat than just killing all the monsters. Seems simple enough, and based on the replies to this thread, it appears quite a few DMs have done that or found other ways to make combat more than just bringing hit point bags to zero.

I remember the morale rules from AD&D, but I also remember them not being used very much in the groups I played in. I personally don't think formal morale rules are necessary. If I'm the DM, I can make such judgments based on the situation, or I'll borrow some rules from a non-5e D&D system if I'm desperate.

I think that Matt is being a bit click baity in his titling. He does not really claim that combat is boring in the general case. He outlines a specific case where combat is boring and discusses that but like his last video on what is D&D about he is setting up a future set of videos and commentary and perhaps doing some product promotion while he is at it.

 

[Argyle King]

I believe that some contributing factors are some of the game design:

•using HP as a primary way to scale monsters
•going back toward 1 creature of a CR against a party

I know there was some backlash against 4E, but I don't understand why 5E would keep the HP bloat (bad) from 4E while also getting rid of the better encounter-design philosophy of 4E.

I think the opposite choice should have been made: less numbers bloat; keep the idea that one standard creature is roughly equal to one PC.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

I think the opposite choice should have been made: less numbers bloat; keep the idea that one standard creature is roughly equal to one PC.

Completely agree with this sentence.

 

[Baron Opal II]

Ok, just pulling the example from Kobold Fight Club...
If you plan a deadly encounter (18 orcs) for a 4 person party of 8th level characters and they flee after the first is killed, does that still count as a deadly encounter?

Simple answer: Yes.

Complex answer: No. You wouldn't check morale after the first of a group was killed, unless they are noted to have rather poor morale. I check when half the group is eliminated or the leader is. (So, that's a case where taking out one creature would cause the rest to flee.) Should morale be lost, the encounter still counts.

And, because my reading comprehension is poor today, I read the last part as "... does that still count for experience?" Which is, of course, a different question. But, if I had a combat "budget", it would still count for whatever metric because defeat does not necessarily mean slaughter.

On the other hand, my players vent a lot of frustration with the pretend slaughter of fictional dastardly beasties. If that's the mood, then they fight to the last critter.

 

[codo]

While I was the first person to bring up morale in this thread, I know it's not a perfect solution.

First, I think players need to be aware that gaining experience from encounter comes from defeating or overcoming the encounter. This doesn't require killing everything off, if the party achieves a victory. This has been the case since at least 2e.

Some players might feel paranoid about leaving enemies alive, and will seek to kill everything. Here it's on the DM not to go overboard with the "gotcha" situations.

And there are players who are just bloodthirsty and will murderhobo everything in sight. That's not necessary the fault of the DM or rules. For example, in my Night Below game I was running, there was a scripted encounter with hostile NPCs that stated they'd flee if things went bad. Well things did go bad, and the two survivors attempted to run, but the party wizard locked them down with web and the party ruthlessly finished them off.



Oh yes. One of the first games I played in had a player fart around for a good twenty minutes real time trying to buy a magic battleaxe, and the rest of us were not impressed or entertained.

I used to like the idea of using morale rules and fleeing enemies, but using them ended up being more trouble than they were worth. I liked the idea of shortening combats and adding some realistic behavior to the game, but they ended up causing several problems.

First of all if you are playing a more heroic game, having the enemies flee can cause all sorts of story and narrative problems. Heroes don't like letting monsters escape, to be free to attack other innocent people in the future. My players would inevitably end up trying to chase down the fleeing monsters. It would usually end up taking longer than finishing the combat would have in the first place.

The second big issue was that if I didn't handle things carefully it was really easy to put the players in a no win situation and hurt feelings. It was difficult to have enemies flee when the party was under any kind of time pressure. It doesn't feel good when a bunch a goblins escapes into the city to wreak havoc, while the party is to busy rushing of to stop the Big Bad's evil plans. Don't get me wrong, I love torturing my players with difficult moral decisions as much as the next DM. However that kind of difficult moral quandaries tend to work best when they are the direct result of the characters actions, particularly when you foreshadowed the choices in advance. Having every random fight be a potential moral gotcha gets old fast.

In theory I like the idea of morale rules, I just think they work better in a old school dungeon crawl, fantasy Vietnam style game, than in a more modern heroic narrative driven style game.

One thing I have been doing in my games instead of having the enemies flee, is that once the party has basically won a fight and they are in the mopping up phase, is to just narratively describe the end of a fight. Usually something like, "As you slay the bandit leader the rest of the band loses their nerve and panics. You easily cut them down as they flee in terror." (Writing it out sounds a bit blood thirsty, but that is my party. D&D players love a good murderous rampage. What are you going to do?)

 

[RuinousPowers]

Simple answer: Yes.

Complex answer: No. You wouldn't check morale after the first of a group was killed, unless they are noted to have rather poor morale. I check when half the group is eliminated or the leader is. (So, that's a case where taking out one creature would cause the rest to flee.) Should morale be lost, the encounter still counts.

And, because my reading comprehension is poor today, I read the last part as "... does that still count for experience?" Which is, of course, a different question. But, if I had a combat "budget", it would still count for whatever metric because defeat does not necessarily mean slaughter.

On the other hand, my players vent a lot of frustration with the pretend slaughter of fictional dastardly beasties. If that's the mood, then they fight to the last critter.

I was simply using the morale rules from Basic which checks after the first one is killed, then at 50%.

But since we are talking about 18 orcs using the same CR, then we can just say the one killed in my example was the leader.

 

[overgeeked]

Once again the lack of skill challenge shows. Though I think there needs to be added some kind of meta currency to make check more reliable or to buy an autosuccess.

For example the fighter and the cleric are being chased and run across the bazaar where they see a crowd of beggars. The cleric throws some coin in front of the beggars and the reverse their cloaks and pretend to be beggars scrambling for coin. Spending some meta plot coupon to buy a success. May be at the price of giving the DM a future use of a complication depending on the die roll.

Yeah, D&D really needs some kind of skill challenge or clock mechanic. It would make so many things so much easier. As bad as the presentation of skill challenges was in 4E, we need something like that. Lift clocks from PbtA or BitD and you're good.

"You're all running through the streets chasing the thief. Doing things in the fiction to catch the thief (i.e. making checks, casting spells, etc) and filling up this clock represents you gaining ground and getting closer to catching the thief. The thief doing things in the fiction to escape (i.e. making checks, casting spells, etc) and filling up that clock represents them gaining ground and getting closer to getting away. Go."

 

[Vaalingrade]

I feel like the question we need to ask is whether we want to avoid or end fight early to avoid the boring fights, or make fights more interesting.

I'm for the latter. Have them take place in interesting locations with things to interact with besides the monsters and traps. Pirate of the Caribbean was good with this: the fight in the smithy, the fight amongst the pirate treasure, the fight on the ship that was actively being hit with cannon fire. Never a dust up in a blank corridor or empty field.

I love building encounters like this. For example, a fight with ogres with axes in a forest. Anyone that misses while a tree is in reach might hit the tree instead, and if they did enough damage (like if they were an ogre or something) they would fell the tree, potentially hitting someone on the field and creating hindering terrain.

 

[iserith]

I feel like the question we need to ask is whether we want to avoid or end fight early to avoid the boring fights, or make fights more interesting.

Yes, I'm not really sure how DMs are falling into presenting boring fights in the first place. All the fights except one in my session the other night were rolled right off a random table and none of them were boring. (Separately - 2 hellhounds; 8 harpies; 1 manticore. Staged encounters were swarms of bats and a half-dragon basilisk. The PCs engaged the bats socially instead of fighting.)